Instagram's Brand Tools; Soundcloud's Foray Into Ads

It’s finally happened: Instagram has made generally available a set of tools for brands. Read the blog. What’s in the offering? An account insights dashboard that shows impressions, reach and engagement; an ads insights dashboard that shows how paid media campaigns are performing, with the usual KPIs depicting impressions, reach and frequency; and an ad staging interface through which marketing teams can develop and preview creative. The Instagram blog post says the tools will provide “a real-time campaign summary and data showing how their target audience is responding to each of their sponsored photos. Also, brand marketers will be able to better understand the best time of day to post a photo or video.”

SoundCloud Open For Ads

SoundCloud, reaching 175 million people each month, has hung its shingle on Madison Ave. Red Bull, Jaguar and Sonos will be among the first advertisers to run campaigns. Ad formats include native-style sponsored tracks, audio ads, mobile display ads and sponsored contests. Read on at New York Timesand Mashable.

Calling Chief Programmatic Officers

Man vs. machine? Why not man and machine? There’s a growing crop of talent in the C-suite and, in the future, all data-driven organizations may employ one. It’s the chief programmatic officer, or “CPO,” as Finn Faldi, CEO of Trueffect, wrote for Ad Age. Media shops from Meredith to The New York Times have one on the payroll and, as real-time bidding rises to $9 billion in ad spend by 2017, technical and analytical prowess will continue to rise in prominence at the executive level, Faldi predicts. Readmore.

What’s In A Native Name?

Sponsored content? Partner content? Paid content? There’s a labeling problem in native advertising and a new browser plugin called AdDetector aims to solve the issue. Once a user downloads AdDetector, available for Chrome and Firefox, the extension scans for native ads. When AdDetector lives up to its name and detects a sponsored article, the extension displays a big honking red banner at the top of the page. AdDetector creator Ian Webster, a Google product engineer who created the service in his spare time, told The Wall Street Journal that the goal is to create transparency. “The readers either know it or they don’t,” Webster told the Journal. “A lot of native ads depend on them not knowing.”

Verizon: No App Store

In response to multiple reports Wednesday that the company would launch an app store, Verizon spokeswoman Debra Lewis offered Re/code a hard no. "We have no plans to do that,” she said in a statement. “Been there. Done that." The news was first reported by The Information. If Verizon comes off a bit burned in its statement to Re/code, it's because this wouldn't be its first app store rodeo. The carrier tried to compete with Google’s app store back in 2013, but the effort failed to gain traction. Read on.